UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation investigates how syllables are organized in space and time to form coherent units. To do so, I engage with two theoretical approaches to the syllable: one based on the Sonority Sequencing Principle, and the coupled oscillator model advanced within Articulatory Phonology. I focus on Georgian because Georgian has extremely permissive phonotactics: onsets can be up to seven consonants and there are minimal restrictions on the combinations of consonants that can occur. I address this question via a trio of Electromagnetic Articulography experiments that examine the effect of sonority shape on the temporal relationships between gestures in the onset. The first experiment examines the relationship between sonority and the global timing of gestures in the onset. In the Articulatory Phonology framework, syllable onsets are coordinated as a unit with respect to the nucleus. I find that Georgian does not show evidence of global coordination regardless of the sonority shape of the onset and provide motivations for this unexpected behavior from other aspects of linguistic structure. The second experiment examines the relationship between sonority and local timing of consonant gestures in the onset. Here I find a systematic relationship between sonority and timing: in sonority rises (e.g., /br/) consonant gestures are the least overlapped, plateaus (e.g., /bg/) are an intermediate case, and in sonority falls (e.g., /rb/) consonant gestures are the most overlapped. I argue that long lags between gestures are the default in Georgian, and that in sonority falls the lag is shortened in order to prevent intrusive vocoids, which are more threatening to the syllable parse in onsets with initial sonorants. The third experiment examines the relationship between morphological structure and gestural timing and finds that the presence of a morphological boundary in the onset has no effect on timing. I then present a unified account of gestural timing in Georgian onsets in which I argue that 1) Georgian does not need to use temporal coordination to distinguish onsets and codas because of phonotactic patterns, and 2) the absence of the predicted global coordination facilitates the slotting-in of consonant-only morphemes, which are common in Georgian. I also provide typological predictions based on this account and suggest a mechanism by which local timing modulations are achieved.